Christoph Thaiss studies how interactions between the environment, the body, and the brain regulate human physiology and disease susceptibility. His group has uncovered several new principles of gut-brain communication and their implications in a broad range of whole-body phenomena, including the regulation of exercise physiology, the impact of psychological stress on inflammatory disease, and the neurocognitive manifestations of post-infection syndromes. His group also studies the impact of environmental and lifestyle factors on the development of common age-associated diseases. His research may open new avenues for understanding and treating diseases that involve communication pathways between the brain and the body.
Academic Career
Christoph Thaiss studied molecular biomedicine, immunology and microbiology at the University of Bonn, Germany, Yale University, USA, and ETH Zurich, CH. After a short-term fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, USA, he moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, from where he earned his PhD in 2017. Since 2018, he is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. He is the recipient of the Science & SciLifeLab Prize of the journal Science and the Science for Life Laboratory in Sweden, a scholarship from the Pew Charitable Trusts, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the Brain Research Innovator Award in Aging and Memory Loss of the American Federation for Aging Research and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation.
